Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/590

580 the common practice of small farmers in combining for the ownership of mowers and reapers or in contracting for the harvest.

No subject of greater importance could be brought before the English-speaking people; none of greater weight in maintaining our interdependence with our kin beyond the seas. The right comprehension of this problem will give assurance of peace, good-will and plenty.

It may be interesting to call your attention to the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers spent several years in Holland before they migrated to New England. The larger part both of Pilgrims and Puritans came from the southeastern counties of England, where institutions had been greatly modified by Dutch, Flemish and Huguenot immigrants. The Dutch themselves settled New York and other colonies. We derive our common schools, our toleration of religion, our welcome to invention and our free division of land chiefly from the Dutch, rather than from our English ancestors. It is true that the Puritans were intolerant and that the Dutch attempted to establish large manors in the State of New York, under patroons, so-called; but the more liberal tendencies of the Pilgrims in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Baptists of Rhode Island, the Dutch in New York and the Catholics in Maryland overcame the intolerance of the Puritans, while the free system of land holding also displaced all other tenures.